FORMER HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER IN DALLAS
SENTENCED TO 10 YEARS IN FEDERAL PRISON ON
CHILD PORNOGRAPHY CONVICTIONS

DALLAS — Jon Leslie Lyons, who until last year was an English teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas, was sentenced this morning by U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade to 10 years in federal prison after his guilty plea in September 2010 to an indictment charging three counts of receiving child pornography and one count of possessing child pornography. In addition, Judge Kinkeade ordered that Lyons, 45, who has been in custody since his arrest in June 2010, would not be given credit for time served, must register as a sex offender and must serve a lifetime of supervised release following his imprisonment. The announcement was made today by U.S. Attorney James T. Jacks of the Northern District of Texas

According to documents filed in the case, in May 2010, a Dallas Independent School District (DISD) employee notified U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), that they had discovered possible child pornography on a DISD computer assigned to Lyons.

Soon thereafter, an HSI special agent met with the DISD employee who made the referral and viewed images of prepubescent females posing in lewd and lascivious manners that had been recently forensically recovered from Lyon’s work computer. Several HSI special agents then met Lyons at his apartment in Dallas, near the school, and conducted a consensual interview. In that interview Lyons said that he had images of 13-16 year-old nude teens, as well as images of prepubescent females, engaged in sexually explicit conduct on his home desktop computer and Apple iPhone. He also stated that he had downloaded child pornography from the Internet to his iPhone as recently as the previous day.

This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice, to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse. Led by U.S. Attorneys’ Offices and the Criminal Division's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS), Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to better locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the Internet, as well as to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.projectsafechildhood.gov

The case was investigated by ICE HSI and prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Lisa J. Miller.